Natalee Young Terkel is a marketing major at the University of Pennsylvania. She expects to graduate in the spring, and is looking forward to launching her professional career.

“My parents are a little freaked out that I haven’t graduated yet,” she says. “I turned thirty last June. But I know what I’m doing.” After she got out of high school, she says that she just wasn’t ready to continue her education yet. She knew she wanted to, but figured it could wait. “I graduated from high school with a 3.8 grade point average, so it’s not like I couldn’t get in to college. But for four years – more than that, really – all I had done was study, study, study. And I wanted to take some time to myself to see what I could do.”

By then she was into yoga, and while she wasn’t ready to continue her formal education she took enough courses to become a certified yoga instructor. She wound up doing that for six years before deciding she was ready for college. At her father’s suggestion, she decided to major in marketing. “He said that a marketing degree was extremely flexible; that it would open a lot of doors for me. I don’t have my degree just yet, but from everything I learned since then, he was right.”

Natalee Young Terkel is minoring in Computer Science, with an emphasis on programming. Computers aren’t going away any time soon, she says, so knowledge of programming is also a valuable career skill.